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Worker Rights and Jobs

At MLK Conference, Unionists Strategize On Organizing The South

January 18, 2024 Mark Gruenberg, Portside. , , ,
Unionists at the AFL-CIO’s annual Martin Luther King conference, held January 12-14 in Montgomery, Ala., tackled what one panelist called a decades-long problem for the labor movement: Organizing the South. And that means both for more union victories, and members, and politically, too. The conference, in a birthplace of the modern civil rights movement, preceded the first actual voting of the 2024 presidential campaign: The January 15 Iowa Republican caucuses, pitted former GOP Oval Office occupant Donald Trump—a self-professed authoritarian who’d rip up the U.S. Constitution—against the rest of the field.

Davos And The Melting World Economy

January 17, 2024 Michael Roberts, Left Voice. , , , ,
The annual jamboree of the rich global elite called the World Economic Forum (WEF) is under way again in the luxury ski resort of Davos, Switzerland.  Thousands will attend and many of the ‘great and good’ of political and corporate leaders have arrived in their private jets with huge entourages.  The speakers include China’s premier Li Qiang, the head of the EU, Ursula von de Leyen, Zelenskyy from Ukraine and many top business leaders. The WEF aims to discuss the challenges facing humanity in 2024 and onwards.  These challenges, however, are primarily seen from the point of view of global capital and any proposed policy solutions are driven by the aim to sustain the world capitalist order.

Why Fair Trade Produce Labels Are Bogus

January 16, 2024 Anna Canning and James Daria, Labor Notes. , , ,
Any U.S. consumer walking down the supermarket aisle will find berries, tomatoes, and other vegetables that are labeled “responsibly grown,” “farmworker-assured,” and “fair-trade certified.” But behind the labels, the Mexican workers who harvest these fruits and vegetables live and labor in conditions they call “twenty-first century slavery.” We interviewed 200 workers for our new report “Certified Exploitation: How Equitable Food Initiative and Fair Trade USA Fail to Protect Farmworkers in the Mexican Produce Industry.” They detailed widespread wage theft, sexual harassment, rampant retaliation, and, in the most extreme cases, forced labor.

Workers At Jollibee Are Taking On A Multinational Fast-Food Giant

January 15, 2024 Trevor Clarke , Jacobin. , , , ,
In a certain corner of New Jersey, the “hot labor summer” that recently swept the country began early. In January 2023, minimum-wage workers at a Jersey City location of Jollibee, the beloved Philippines-based fast-food chain, circulated a petition for better working conditions and higher pay. Their demands included a three-dollar wage increase over the state minimum (then $14.13 an hour), double-time pay on holidays, and other basic improvements. Within a few weeks, over 90 percent of their coworkers had signed the petition. The store’s management caught on quickly; petitioners say they think it was tracking their activities online.

Youth Subminimum Wages And Why They Should Be Eliminated

January 14, 2024 Nina Mast, Economic Policy Institute. , , ,
In 2023, the issue of child labor re-emerged as a national crisis. Federal data on the rise of child labor violations and numerous investigative reports of widespread illegal youth employment garnered sustained media attention, sparking outrage from the public and lawmakers alike. At the same time, EPI has documented an ongoing, coordinated effort to roll back existing child labor protections that is gaining momentum in states across the country. Legislative proposals to weaken child labor protections—some of which have already been enacted—allow employers to hire teens for more dangerous jobs or extend the hours young people can work on school nights.

Massachusetts Illegal Teacher Strike Wave Rolls On

January 12, 2024 Barbara Madeloni, Labor Notes. , , , ,
A wildly successful, illegal three-day strike by the Andover Education Association in November has reverberated statewide for educators in Massachusetts. The lowest-paid instructional assistants got a 60 percent wage jump immediately. Classroom aides on the higher end of the scale got a 37 percent increase. Members won paid family medical leave, an extra personal day, fewer staff meetings, and the extension of lunch and recess times for elementary students. Andover is 20 miles north of Boston, and the strike involved 10 schools. For 10 months and 27 bargaining sessions, the Andover School Committee had insisted that none of these demands was possible.

Organizers Speak Out As Employers Investigations Hit Record Lows

January 12, 2024 James Anderson, Barn Raiser. , , ,
Sixty years after Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta founded the National Farm Workers Association, agricultural workers—especially migrants—continue to be subjected to widespread abuses, including wage theft and dangerous working conditions, due to lax enforcement of labor regulations, concerted efforts by employers to skirt the rules that are in place and a political-economic system that favors employers. Despite these challenges, labor organizations have helped farmworkers stand up for themselves and together with other workers, with some success. Although migrants working temporary and seasonal jobs on farms are legally protected by the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division (WHD) under the H-2A visa program, legal protection does not necessarily translate into workplace protections, especially absent a union presence.

How Workers Of An Italian Factory Are Creating History

January 10, 2024 People's Dispatch. , , ,
The fight against plant closures, offshoring, mass layoffs, and persecution has been an almost a daily affair for the working class in Europe over the past two decades. COVID-19 and the escalating cost of living crisis further pushed workers to the brink. Over these years ridden with scorching attacks of global finance capital marked with austerity and ‘slave’ labor, grassroots mobilization and solidarity were two major pillars of working-class organization and resistance. It is in this context that the fightback by the workers of the former GKN factory in Campi Bisenzio near Florence in Italy against layoffs and plant closure, which has been on for more than 900 days, has created history.

Québec Workers Conduct Largest Strike Ever

January 9, 2024 Shannon Ikebe, Labor Notes. , , , ,
One of the largest strikes in North American history happened this winter and the struggle is ongoing. In Québec, 420,000 public sector workers in health care and education, united in a “Common Front” (Front Commun) of four major union federations, spent seven days on strike December 8-14. This followed half-day and three-day work stoppages in November. In addition to the Common Front, 66,500 workers in one of the teachers unions—la Féderation Autonome d’Enseignement (FAE)—were on strike for more than a month and more than 80,000 workers with a nurses union, la Fédération Interprofessionelle de la Santé du Québec (FIQ), struck December 11-14.

Argentina: Building The General Strike Against The Milei Government

January 9, 2024 Fredy Lizarrague, Left Voice. , , ,
Since taking office last month, Javier Milei, the new far-right president of Argentina, has announced a series of economic proposals and attacks on basic democratic rights that, if implemented, will devastate the working class. In response, labor unions and the Left have called for a general strike on January 24. The Partido de los Trabajadores Socialistas (PTS), the sister organization of Left Voice in Argentina, is calling for the working class to take the general strike into its own hands to defeat these proposals and the entire neolibertarian regime. Among the new proposals are changes to more than 300 laws that would weaken labor unions, limit democratic rights, repress protest through a set of new “security protocols,” and allow for the further modification of legislation without the approval of the Argentinian congress.

Argentine Courts Grant Union’s Request To Suspend Milei’s Reform

January 8, 2024 Brasil De Fato, People's Dispatch. , , , ,
The Argentine judiciary has granted a request from the National Confederation of Labor (CGT), the country’s main trade union center, and suspended the effects of the labor reform provided for in the “decree” launched by the government of ultra-right Javier Milei last December. The court decision published on January 3 is a precautionary one, i.e. it suspends the measure. The decision was taken by the National Chamber of Labor Appeals, the first instance in the Argentine judiciary for appeals on labor issues. The court argued that there was no proven need or urgency to make the decision without consulting the Argentine Congress, which is responsible for legislation.

Talking Socialism On The Job

January 7, 2024 Garrett Brown, Against the Current. , , ,
With a new generation of socialist activists entering the workforce to build unions and the socialist movement, experiences from 45 years ago may provide lessons about what works and what does not work when talking socialism on the job. I joined the Young Socialist Alliance in 1971 and the Socialist Workers Party in 1973, resigning from the party in December 1983. I was a student activist in California, Massachusetts, and Illinois, before becoming the labor reporter for The Daily Calumet newspaper in southeast Chicago in 1976. While a journalist at The Daily Calumet I covered the United Steel Workers of America (USWA) and Ed Sadlowski’s campaign for union president in 1976-77.

Direct Elections For Labor Leaders Make For More Militant Unions

January 6, 2024 Chris Bohner, Labor Notes. , , ,
The labor movement is rightfully celebrating recent contract victories by the United Auto Workers, Teamsters, SAG-AFTRA and the Writers Guild of America, which together cover nearly 650,000 workers. An essential thread uniting the campaigns is that the top union officers were all directly elected by the members, a basic democratic right denied to many union members in the United States. As other unions seek to learn lessons from these historic contract fights, a key takeaway is that a vibrant democratic process—“one member, one vote”—is crucial to a revitalized labor movement.

NLRB Accuses SpaceX Of Illegally Firing Workers For Criticizing Elon Musk

January 6, 2024 Mariella Moon, Engadget. , , ,
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has filed a complaint against SpaceX, accusing it of unlawfully firing eight employees involved in writing a letter that called Elon Musk's behavior on social media "a frequent source of distraction and embarrassment." According to the filing, the company committed an unfair labor practice when it fired the workers for "engaging in protected concerted activity at work." It also accused SpaceX of interrogating at least one employee about the letter, as well as about the identities of their colleagues and the nature of their "concerted protected activity."

Union Democracy Stands Up

January 5, 2024 Barry Eidlin, Dollars & Sense. , , , ,
The First Weekend of November, 2023, Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) held its annual convention at a hotel near O’Hare Airport outside of Chicago. It was the 48th convention since the rank-and-file union reform movement’s founding in 1976. The mood was confident and upbeat, with organizers announcing an attendance of 500 Teamster members from across the country. It was the largest TDU convention since 1997. The Friday dinner banquet speaker was Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien, who took stock of what his administration had accomplished since taking office in March 2022.
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